Like many people, I first saw Michelle Rhee on the cover of Time, standing in front of a blackboard holding a broom. As an Asian American woman educator myself, you can imagine I almost got whiplash turning my head sharply back to confirm what I just saw. I picked up the article, read it, sighed and shook my head.

After being appointed Chancellor of the school district, this Korean heritage American educator went into the dilapidated D.C. school systems like a wildfire and proceeded to clean it from the inside out by “doing what needed to be done” such as firing a ton of teachers, administrators and staff; closing half empty schools and relocating students; and tying teacher pay and job security to student test scores, just to name a few. Rhee is undoubtedly a controversial figure thanks to her no excuses reform approach to the public school system. This new episode of Frontline documenting Michelle Rhee’s journey as a school reformer brought all of this back to light.

Is Rhee a courageous woman who cares deeply about the education of the children of this country? Absolutely. Is she right in bringing the incompetencies of a school system and the failures of teachers, administrators, and staff to light? Yes and double yes. Is she an admirable educator and Asian American personage that APIA should be proud of? Most certainly. Did she do the right reforms on her crusade to clean up the D.C. school system? This is where I shake my head and sigh. Let me explain.
The core of my head shaking is the fact that Rhee’s reforms seem to revolve around one key indicator of student success–standardized test scores. I’ve already laid out my discontent with that system and am especially against the grip of the standardized test system on Asian Pacific Islander Americans specifically because “we’re” so gosh darn good at it.

It sure sounds like a good thing, being all smart and good at getting high test scores as a group, and yeah, of course, it is definitely racist to just assume that every APIA you meet is good at school, forcing every APIA to carry this colonial yoke of the model minority. However, I am most upset when APIA of all ages are parading around congratulating themselves for being smarter than everyone else just because of the color of their skin or the genetics in their nuclei or the superiority of their “culture”, not only because it’s just despicably ignorant, but also because it is so disgustingly self-degrading and self-shackling. We’re so proud of the fact that when they said jump, we said “how high?”, and then patted ourselves on the back when we jumped higher than everyone else. Who’s the monkey and who’s the master in this picture?

Standardized test scores and grades are all just false products. Instead of writing books, creating mind blowing new art, or engaging in deep dialogue about real problems and actually trying to come up with real solutions for them, really preparing our youth for their future as the new generation, we’ve reduced the potential of their greatest accomplishments to a multiple choice scantron test score and the tyrannical performance grade of a teacher, all under the guise of fair, objective, and accurate measurement of student performance.

The big controversy around Rhee’s supposed success in improving the education of students and raising the test scores in the D.C. school district is that there were accusations of rampant cheating done by the teachers whose very job security depended on how well their students scored. By casting this shadow of doubt on Rhee’s success, I’m sure opposers were trying to discredit her and her methods.

But you know what? I don’t even care if there was cheating or not. Let’s just assume that all the gains that the district made under Rhee’s chancellorship were totally legit. Let’s assume that there was zero cheating going on. And really, if you went around firing bad teachers and putting their feet to the fire to produce higher test scores or else, I’m sure there were many teachers who stepped up their game and really helped their kids score higher on those tests.

However, here’s the hell that both that fireball of awesome Michelle Rhee, her opposers, and her supporters were creating–a world in which the value of each individual child was measured by a supposedly unbiased number of pure truth, the standardized test score. In fact, this is the world as it is today for the children of America, especially thanks to President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, a program that Rhee supports.

I always hear on the news about this school or that school really turning it around and making their test scores jump by reaching out to the community, having higher expectations, improving teacher quality, etc. etc. despite the students coming from backgrounds of poverty, violence, and suffering. When I hear this news, I’m happy for the kids, happy for the community and the school, knowing that the improvement of the test scores is some indication of things being better than they were and that there is more learning going on than before.

Unfortunately, since it is still under the oppressive system of standardized test scores, what I also see is a community and a school working so wholeheartedly to help their youth become enslaved into a system that robs them of their dignity as unique individuals and prevents them from fulfilling their fullest potentials in life. Students who obediently ask “How high should I jump teacher?” instead of “Why should I jump? Is there something else more relevant I could be doing with my time?”

For all you educators out there, please do not pull out the card of “but we use multiple measures at our school/district”. That vague defense coupled with the waving banners with API scores (school standardized test achievement) and the infinite hours of actual high quality learning lost to test prep and test taking just doesn’t cut it. We may use multiple measures, but the final score on the card is a standardized one, and everything else, even the other multiple measures, are hell-bent on improving that standardized test score. Our kids are losing out on real learning in the interest of jumping through orderly hoops, missing out on critical developmentally sensitive time that they’ll never get back, and that is simply immoral.

I admire Michelle Rhee, I really do. She has gumption and is a courageous go-getter not afraid to blaze in and do what she thinks is best and right. You simply cannot get more American than that, and I just love that about her. But for all her hard work, blood, sweat and tears, she took the easy and lazy way out when it came to real improvement in learning and instruction. She depended on the standardized test score system as the thermometer of her success in improving education for children.

Our dependence on this system is a result of it being the cheapest and easiest way to measure the progress of our next generation. It is not because it is the best system of assessment. No expert in educational research, not even the statisticians, will tell you it is an accurate measurement of the educational abilities of each child.

And I’m not kidding when I say Rhee used it as a thermometer. When the thermometer tells us it’s 50 degrees Fahrenheit outside, it just tells us the temperature of a single place and moment in space and time. It doesn’t tell us that a storm is coming or that the wind is blowing hard or that the rain is pouring down.

Just like educators and parents and administrators all across America, Rhee stuck that thermometer out, read the temperature, and based on that single number of a temperature degree, concluded that the sky was cloudlessly blue, the grass was vibrantly green, the ducks were flying back, the wind was mild, and the sun was shining on all. Welcome to the beautifully paved road to hell where the cosmic miracle that is the soul of a human child can be totally represented by a heartless scantron number.

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jlee

Sorry, I feel that most of the opposition against Rhee is solely because she is liked by Republicans. Harshness IS needed in American education. Standardized tests are by no means the end all to achievement, but it IS a useful, albeit roughly estimated indicator. No amount of fancy confidence building and moral platitudes is ever going to change that. You can bet your last dollar that a class with higher average score DOES translate to better real life performances than a class that has a lower score.

In Asian countries, I agree there is overemphasis on testing and cram culture. In America, I believe it’s the opposite.

With all this talk about educational reform, my first response is “Why is it often that people never ask the kids and students what they want?” and this can be said about many scenarios where people attempt to make improvements without considering other people’s perspectives–namely the beneficiaries. One of the ongoing efforts I’ve seen as an aid worker in developing countries involves getting feedback from the government, community, parents, educators, and, most importantly, the children, and try to find that overlap in the Venn diagram of perspectives in order to work towards something that is both efficient and sustainable.

jlee

Okay, but we’re talking about students here. What sort of real life performances can we gauge them by? They don’t even have careers yet.

honky wonky

give them weapons and set them out on an island somewhere – the
strongest shall survive, as Republican ideology would have us believe

Michelle Rhee is a neoliberal stooge who is part of the filthy scheme to create a false public school crisis so she and her corporate cronies can swoop in and set up charter schools and privatize the educational system. She is not courageous, she is not tough, she is a fraud and a gimmick who enraged teachers, parents, and schools of her district, pushed her lackies to cheat and then cover up to make ridiculous standardized testing quotas. Did you morons even take ten minutes to read what Michelle Rhee actually did?

FabiusMaximus

That is complete crap. Harshness is not needed in educating CHILDREN, you moron. Go take your ching chong algebra at 5 years old crap back to China.

Instead of giving students a test to “measure” how well they can write, why not have them write, and let teachers help guild them in producing the best quality work possible and presenting it to real evaluating audiences (who WILL rip it apart). Produce a TRUE PRODUCT not the fake product of a test score.

Instead of taking tests on American History, write reports, investigations, and create museum exhibits that teach others (and the student) the information in a relevant way. Create historical records and documentation of their own lives and of their local communities, and not just as a cutsie project to be turned in graded and thrown away, but as something really presented to an audience. Again, have the students spending time doing something REAL. What better way to prepare for the REAL WORLD?

I’ve taught this way every day for the last six years out of my 16 years of professional teaching and it WORKS.

And there is a way to restructure our schools and RE-PRIORITIZE, choosing to focus on worthy end-goals and end-products (that are NOT useless test scores), without hiring more people or spending more on anything. No need to tell me our schools are strapped for cash. I’ve lived it as a teacher, and I see it in the furlough days kids have been getting. Longer vacations to save money. Sad.

iko: STFU mikey STORMloq, the same garbage that is found in STOMRfront. Aren't you yourself doing the same "...making subjective statements about your own ethnicity, just... – What Do White Supremacists Think of Asians?